Predicting Network Hardware Faults through Layered Treatment of Alarms Logs

Abstract

Maintaining and managing ever more complex telecommunication networks is an increasingly difficult task, which often challenges the capabilities of human experts. There is a consensus both in academia and in the industry on the need to enhance human capabilities with sophisticated algorithmic tools for decision-making, with the aim of transitioning towards more autonomous, self-optimizing networks. We aimed to contribute to this larger project. We tackled the problem of detecting and predicting the occurrence of faults in hardware components in a radio access network, leveraging the alarm logs produced by the network elements. We defined an end-to-end method for data collection, preparation, labelling, and fault prediction. We proposed a layered approach to fault prediction: we first detected the base station that is going to be faulty and at a second stage, and using a different algorithm, we detected the component of the base station that is going to be faulty. We designed a range of algorithmic solutions and tested them on real data collected from a major telecommunication operator. We concluded that we are able to predict the failure of a network component with satisfying precision and recall.

Enabling Alarm-Based Fault Prediction for Smart Meters in District Heating Systems: A Danish Case Study

“…This can be attributed to more sensors in the systems [5] (which also measure more frequently) and developments in machine learning. In industry, work with fault prediction can be seen in examples such as [6], in which they utilize alarm logs to predict hardware faults in telecommunication, and for power systems. Betti et al [7] perform fault prediction in large photovoltaic plants using self-organizing maps.…”